Kingston SSDNow V+100 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 11, 2010 3:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Kingston
- SSDNow V+100
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance I ran a 3 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
Sequential write speed is much higher than Kingston’s previous offerings. Compared to the old V+ there’s very little performance difference here. The new V+ 100 does well even against SandForce and Crucial based SSDs. In fact, if you write incompressible data to the SandForce drives the V+ 100 is the fastest SSD in sequential writes at this capacity.
The 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300 does a respectable 71MB/s here, which isn’t bad for a low capacity value drive. Sequential write speed is equal to Corsair’s F40 when writing incompressible data (e.g. compressed movies or pictures), and better than both the 40GB X25-V and 30GB Kingston SSDNow V Series.
The V+ 100‘s sequential read speed is excellent, just a hair above the top drives from Intel and Crucial. There’s not much room for improvement here unless you go to a 6Gbps interface. Although not displayed here, the Crucial RealSSD C300 on a 6Gbps SATA interface is the single-drive sequential read speed king.
The 64GB C300 loses no performance as a result of its lower capacity, making it the best low capacity drive for sequential read performance.
Overall Iometer shows us that the four corners of SSD performance are not dominated by any one controller/firmware combination. Crucial takes the clear lead in random read performance, while the Toshiba based SSDNow V+ 100 is the 3Gbps sequential read king. Random write performance depends mostly on what you’re writing. If you’re writing highly compressed data like movies and pictures, then Crucial is the undisputed champ there as well. If you’re writing documents, emails and other highly compressible data, SandForce based drives like the Corsair Force and OCZ Vertex 2 are the drives to beat.
With no silver bullet, we have to look at various desktop workloads to really measure the performance of these drives.
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pvdw - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
"check the speed without compression and then compare drives "That makes no sense!
It's like saying disable branch predictions on one processor because another doesn't have it. Or disable the turbo on one car when comparing to a competing car that is naturally aspirated.
Out of Box Experience - Monday, November 15, 2010 - link
It makes all the sense because it would be a fair comparison of all the SSD's availableNot all drives have compression and not all data is compressible so why not test them all without compression?
Are you afraid that OCZ would be at the bottom of the list in a fair test like this?
Well, you may be right!
Lets test them to be sure
.harm - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
I'm not an expert on SSDs and RAID. So excuse me if my question is a bit stupid.I always understood that it´s impossible to use TRIM with a RAID configuration because the RAID controllers can't ´pass' the TRIM commands. So the SSD performance would drop overtime when using RAID. Now the SSD controller has "always-on garbage collection". Does this mean the performance in a RAID configuration doesn't drop?
AnnihilatorX - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
I would think so, it would at least be better off than other drive with less aggressive garbage collection.sparky76 - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
Will controllers like this leave OS X with a performance advantage over Windows 7, precisely because OS X has no support for the TRIM command?It seems that Win7 will have some system overhead in running TRIM while any OS without TRIM support will not suffer this, as garbage collection will be left to the firmware in the drive.
DoktorSleepless - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
I would love to see loading and minimum frame rate tests from actual games like what was done here a while back.http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/14
It's just really hard to visualize real world performance even from Vantage.
I would bet a game like Fallout 3 would benefit a lot in the minimum frame rate department since it's always loading new data from the hard drive.
Nickel020 - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
I second this. While the IOPS for Bench are a nice measure, I don't know how to actually translate that into real world performance differences. I.e. are the differences in IOPS between say the new Kingston drive and Sandforce drives actually noticeable, and if yes, how noticeable?I would like to see a review that shows how much faster a Sandforce drive is than my old Vertex 1 and X25-M G2.
Chloiber - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
I'd also like to see that, as I said before.Just look at this test from (german) CB as an example:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&pre...
Huge differences in synthetic tests, but a normal desktop system is just too slow to actually benefit from this!
I'm also missing these kinds of tests here. I think your earlier tests were better - now you just go through synthetic tests and show us the results, this isn't the thing I expected 1 or 2 years ago from an SSD test from anandtech.com. I'd like to see more tests which actually measure performance a user really gets when doing everyday tasks.
pavlindrom - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
Wouldn't it be better to have a drive-based sort function run to test how responsive the drive is? I would guess it would stress all of the corners of SSD performance. Write a bunch, shuffle in small portions when flipping values. Maybe it wouldn't test sequential erase. I still think it would show great info.Sufo - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
Just a quick recommendation. I have one of these, and i can confirm that with windows 7 (ie TRIM) and a 6gbps bridge the performance is pretty delicious. Grab one, if you meet these requirements.